How Betway Group Beats the Odds and Adapts to the Future with a Digital In-House Production Strategy

“Bannerflow has saved us around 15,500 hours in production time. Broken down, that’s roughly one designer working for seven years.”

When you’re working with live odds and matches, everything can change – fast. This is particularly true in the world of iGaming. So how do you stand out from the crowd in an industry in which odds, prizes and even games themselves can change by the minute?

Betway Group does just that. Operating in more than twenty countries, Betway Group coordinates teams globally, appearing at major sporting events like the Cheltenham Races, and attracting 2.7 million monthly users, all whilst using an online-only business model, something which requires a lot of assets.

By using Bannerflow, Betway Group has been able to vastly cut production time for its assets. Since August 2021, their design team has saved more than 15,500  hours, and has been able to put that valuable time back into the creative process.

We spoke with David Bevan, Design Manager at Betway Group, about how this 90% reduction in production time has helped to build an in-house digital production strategy that can truly adapt in the rapidly changing world of iGaming.

What have been your main challenges in the past year?

Even before the pandemic hit, we realised that our designers were being held back by production issues, laborious tasks in Photoshop, and our tricky processes in HTML coding. We were basically asking our designers to also be able to use HTML5 code, whilst also designing at the same time. It was pretty challenging.

What we did was we looked at our processes and worked out where we could find ways we could free up our designers to be more creative, and add extra value to the business.

What was the solution in this project, and what were the results?

Our digital display advertising process was the first thing we looked at as we wanted to make enhancements to it. We looked at the market and narrowed it down to a few partners, and then tested to make sure they were the right fit for us.

The rest is history: Bannerflow were the right ones for us.

How many banners have you created, and how much time have you saved?

We started working with Bannerflow in June 2021, which coincided with the relaunch of our brand in August 2021. Since then, we’ve produced around 24,000 banners. Bannerflow has saved us around 15,500  hours in production time. Broken down, that’s roughly one designer working for five years! Bannerflow even helped us with our relaunch. We were able to update our graphic identity. Then, as we no longer had to update each asset individually, we could just change everything in a few clicks.

Having that time has really fixed that previous issue for us. We now have the time to let designers design, and our copywriters can create those different, localised approaches for different markets and different customer segmentations. We’ve also been able to get more specific with our targeting, thanks to Bannerflow’s personalisation capabilities. This lets us reach our audience in an even more direct way.

How much time-to-market have you saved?

It’s about 90%! It varies from project to project, but if we’re working with templates, we can get banners live within half-an-hour.

Today’s consumer has evolved and your audience has moved. So how do you adapt?

The iGaming market can change very quickly, and we need to be able to construct our teams to be able to cater to that. So you need to get the best talent into specific roles. This also helps build consistency in terms of workflow.

But beyond that, you need to keep your eyes open for product developments, tools and advancements. We need to automate as much as possible, become as digital as possible, and become as dynamic as possible, so that we can put that time back into the studio, react to market changes, and launch in a new region. Those are very easy production tasks for us now.

Consumers expect consistency across channels. How do you ensure that?

As with any brand, consistency is key. You want the user to be seeing the same video or creative from one region to another. Obviously, when we’re personalising these things, there are always going to be those minute little changes.

That’s a big part of why we built our own directory of creative elements. For example; in October 2021, we conducted a photoshoot to create our own image bank. What we’ve found is that this is helping us to be a lot more consistent across channels and regions, with display advertising and social advertising, and with what the customer sees when they use our app or our website. It even runs down to our marketing and TV communications.

Our internal workflow systems also ensure quality control in key teams spread across the marketing department. They know the brand inside out, and how our creatives should look and sound. Every single asset goes through our quality control team to be checked over, and to make sure we’re hitting those consistency markers.

How do you stay relevant with a dynamic production strategy?

The trick is to remain agile with your workflows. A nice example of this is from the UK market, where we had a sign-up bonus change. We had to approach that manually: updating each file individually, editing it in Photoshop, making each change individually, going through the QC process. It took two designers two weeks to be able to make this one tiny text change.

Now, we have a backend system set up where all of our T&Cs and sign-up bonus information is stored. All we have to do is hop into our backend system and make that change, then press ‘save’. In about a minute, the changes are live. We just update it with a click.

We’re trying to make these sorts of changes to any process that we have internally.

We see a lot of personalisation in iGaming ads, but this can be a challenge for the actual production of assets. How did you take control of this?

The way Betway Group is set up, it’s very much local markets first. When we enter a new market, we set up dynamic templates which can quickly be leveraged and tailored to lots of different markets.

Are you A/B testing?

Yes! We A/B test as much as possible. The iGaming market allows it, so we try to do it. We take the learning from that and try to apply to as many other touch points across the business as possible.

Do you use heatmaps in your optimisation?

We use heatmaps to really know how people interact with our marketing and with our advertising. It helps our targeting. With Bannerflow, we have a great heat map function, which really helps us to understand if people are responding to our CTAs.

Eight-times-out-of-ten, our heatmap is centred around the CTA, which tells us that they’re working. We’re trying to use the information from these maps to inform our creative decisions.

Take the next step

In the ever-changing iGaming industry, you need to be able to work in an agile way. Thanks to Bannerflow’s creative management platform, you can quickly create dynamic banners, push them live in all the sizes you need, and update them when needed with just a handful of clicks.

If you want to work in as agile a way as Betway Group does, book a demo today.